Maine Log Home Builder Wins China Contract

Maine Log Home Builder Wins China Contract~

Maine Log Home Builder Wins
China Contract~

Katahdin Cedar Log Homes, a manufacturer based in Oakfield,
Maine, has inked a deal with a Chinese real estate developer to
supply log home kits for a high-end development at a man-made
lake in Chengdu, China, according to a report from Maine Public
Broadcasting Network
(“
Maine Log Home Builder Wins Contract to Sell Homes in
China,” by Tom Porter). “Parcels of land
around the lake will be sold off to the wealthier members of
China's growing middle class, who can then purchase their own
Maine-made cedar log dwellings for the equivalent of
$375,000,” MPBN reported.
Syswin, Inc., one of China’s largest development
companies, selected Katahdin over a dozen competitors,
according to the MPBN report. Katahdin will package and ship
the houses with labels and instructions for assembly, company
president David Gordon told the network: “Everything's
labeled and numbered and has a place to go, so you just follow
the blueprints and pile it up according to the
blueprints.”
China’s surging real estate industry has also made
waves on the West Coast: Lumber exports from British Columbia
and from Washington, Oregon, and California to China have been
setting records recently. “At nearly $1 billion so far
this year, the value of wood exports to China was more than
twice last year’s level for the same period, and are
expected to continue to increase over the next five years,
although at a slower pace,” The Vancouver Sun
reported last week
(“
Export diversity to double profits for B.C. wood
producers,” by Darah Hansen).
“Approximately 30 per cent of B.C. softwood lumber
exports has gone to China in 2011, accounting for more than 95
per cent of Canada’s total exports to the
country.”
It’s clear that China’s becoming a bigger
player in world lumber markets, as it is in other global
resource markets. What’s not so clear is whether
China’s housing boom, supposedly based on a rising
middle class, is really sustainable. According to some reports,
what’s happening in China is not a boom, but a
government-stimulated bubble — one that dwarfs
America’s recent housing bubble, and that could pop
even harder.
Chinese developers are creating brand-new communities all
over China. But often, the houses go unsold. Last year, a
15-minute report from Australian TV network SBS took an
in-depth look at China’s over-supply of unoccupied
high-end housing
(“China’s
Ghost Cities,” by Adrian Brown). And where the
U.S. has thousands of housing developments with foreclosed or
never-sold homes in them, America has nothing like this: An
entire city, planned and built to hold 12 million people, where
three quarters of the city is empty.
In an eerie ride, Australian reporter Adrian Brown took a
boat trip along an artificial canal through a giant Chinese
shopping mall that remains almost entirely empty, where almost
the only people to be seen were a few lonely maintenance
workers paid to keep the place from crumbling into disrepair.
Brown drove through empty streets and toured vacant high-rises,
viewing a depopulated, or never-populated, landscape of fully
built, but wholly unused, infrastructure and housing. The
problem? China has the means to invest in these advanced
properties, but the population lacks the income to purchase
them — or even rent them.
Against that backdrop, are sales of lumber or pre-fab
“middle-class” homes to China a viable
long-term strategy for American companies struggling with our
own employment, income, and financing issues here at home? That
question remains unanswered. But for now, at least, China has
the dollars to buy American — and for American and
Canadian exporters, a customer is a customer, and a sale is a
sale.